How Trump Accidentally Made Obama Great Again

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This post is the opinion of the the author and does not necessarily represent The Good Men Project.

Today Trump has pulled the old bait & switch on a group of Americans called “Dreamers”. The harpooning of DACA targets people who are by all accounts as American as apple pie: the children of immigrants. They take nothing away from anybody. They cost nothing and do nothing but contribute to our nation’s greatness. They are fundamentally what America is all about, really. This decision illuminates the fundamental character of this administration: cruel and mean. No longer can there be any denying what Trump’s agenda is. His tenure has but one goal: to eradicate everything and anything associated with Barack Obama. He hasn’t even tried to hide it.

I’d previously written that Trump is the Middle Finger President.  His one obvious competency is his capacity to give the middle finger to anyone that doesn’t kiss his butt.  Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Trump is the middle finger himself.  He represents a minority of Americans:  mostly uneducated, working class/poor whites who feel angry and left behind.  They are resentful of the gains that blacks, people of color, and immigrants have made.  The majority of them are economically insecure and bent on finding someone to blame because they don’t have the mettle to examine themselves.  White supremacy suits them just fine. Among the educated Trump supporters, most of them are elderly, in retirement, who have too much time to sit and get hypnotized by Fox News. They parrot spitting Obama’s name like a foreign four letter word.

Enough has unfolded in the past 9 months to clarify exactly what Trump’s presidency is about, and it’s clear that it’s about anything but serving America. At this point, he’s alienated a good percentage of his own party.  No need to regurgitate the stream of officials he’s fired or who’ve walked away from his administration.  No need to replay senior members of his own party denouncing his behavior.  It’s become glaringly obvious:  this guy is about one thing, and that is being the stand-in for a basket of American’s once labeled “deplorables”.  While this sounds like a petty insult, the polls have been consistent:  approximately 1/3rd of Americans have deplorable views about black people, people of color, LGBT, and immigrants. They are overwhelmingly white, and while they are not all Trump supporters, ALL Trump supporters are in this demographic. This is his base.  Trump has responded by making every single decision he can to appease and please them. Nothing offended them worse than Barack Obama in the White House. As such, he’s dedicated his entire term to doing nothing other than wiping Obama’s name from the annals of American history.  The only problem (for him) is, he’s actually done the reverse.

Initially, it appeared that approximately 45% of the country was in his camp. This was alarming and deeply distressing for those who held President Obama as a champion of the environment, of civil rights reforms, and the people.  President Obama’s grace and personal skills helped pave the way for a global relationship with the rest of the world. That made many of us feel safer. In just 9 months, Trump has managed to alienate our closest allies, and wall the USA off from much of the world. We look in the mirror and find ourselves facing a toddler-like madman lobbing hydrogen bombs at us. Kim Jong Un is the perfect shadow reflection for Trump who claims to be the “great negotiator” who’s going to make “great deals” all over the world.  So far, he’s been successful at one thing:  rolling back approximately 800 of Obama deals, mostly concerning the environment, civil rights, and immigration.

Look forward: 100 years from now, historians will look back to this era as the turning of the tide in American culture and politics.  Trump’s name will forever be etched in the books as the provocative agitator who turned America on its head. For all his publicity stunts and lust for fame, he probably didn’t think it would go this way. Because of his monumental effort to white-out Obama’s name from history, it will forever be impossible to mention Trump without talking about Barack Obama. History will show that trump would never have been possible if not for President Obama. Van Jones called it “white lash”. It’s a rebound reaction from a white demographic entirely uncomfortable with the idea of a progressive black man in the White House. To make matters worse, Obama’s a far more dignified, intelligent, and graceful man than most of us can ever hope to be.  Who else could have enraged white supremacists this much? And who other than Trump could have emboldened them enough to take their hoods off and show their faces, marching while shouting racists chants with such shameless bravado?

There are no more sacred cows.  When he cut funding to Meals on Wheels, most of us thought, huh?  What’s wrong with you?  Then it was school lunches for children, which prompted Michelle Obama to twist up her face (very un-Beyonce like) and say, “what’s wrong with you?” Now comes DACA and the whole world screws up its face and shouts, “WTF is wrong with you???”

Here’s what’s wrong with him:  there is a tiny fragment of our society that applauds this sort of attitude, and he is a slave to applause.  Speaking of slaves, these are the same people who, when polled said they thought slaves should never have been freed. The same people when polled said they thought white supremacists and Neo Nazis were being marginalized more than people of color. The same people who think the media is a bigger threat to democracy than  white supremacists. These are the people Trump is playing to.  As such, whenever he’s under fire – which is often – he goes on the campaign trail and holds a MAGA rally, where he (in the words of John McCain) “fires up the crazies”. This is the demographic who hold his base intact, and according to polls should he alienate them, his approval ratings dip into the single digits.  

Trump and his tiny base have one agenda: to wipe Obama’s name from the books.  Unfortunately for him, in the years to come, his name will stand in the shadow of Obama as historians will establish comparisons that will have Trump turning in his gold plated grave.  Thanks to Trump, by comparison, President Obama will be seen as a great visionary of supernatural eloquence and character.  Trump’s legacy will be pitifully tarnished as the president who did nothing but roll back Obama’s reforms.  He will be forever known as the president who stood for nothing more than giving a middle finger to President Obama.  All to appease a racist, small minded base standing on their last quivering leg. They’ve found their hero, the archetypal symbol of white supremacy in Donald Trump.

In 100 years, when history looks back, it will be Donald Trump’s anti-legacy that will give torque to Obama’s legacy.  No matter how many Obama regulations and laws Trump rolls back, whether it be the Paris Accord or Cuba or DACA, history will cast a glorious light on Obama. Much of this will we can owe to the spotlight Trump gave him. We will recognize that this dark era is the result of a progressive black man and his family coming to power, agitating the shadow of racism and white supremacy in America. Because of him, the rising up of this ugly shadow that we now see so clearly is firmly in our collective cross hairs.  In 100 years, we will give thanks for Donald J. Trump for making the target so big and easy to hit. We’ll be grateful for how simple he made it for us to see our disease. We will thank him for ushering in a new dream because we were finally able to cut the illness out and begin our healing. Thanks to Donald Trump, we’ll be able to see Barack Obama for the great man that he was, and we’ll build a monument to him upon the failures of Trump and his ilk.

I bet Trump didn’t see that coming.

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Photo Credit: Getty Images